"He'll bully mother till she cries over me. But do as you please. She'll come and she'll beg me——Do as you please. Perhaps I'm a coward. I'd far rather I could slip away."
Trafford thought for a moment. "I'd far rather you could," he answered, in a voice that spoke of inflexible determinations.
They turned to the things they meant to do. "Italy!" she whispered, "Italy!" Her face was alight with her burning expectation of beauty, of love, of the new heaven and the new earth that lay before them. The intensity of that desire blazing through her seemed to shame his dull discretions. He had to cling to his resolution, lest it should vanish in that contagious intoxication.
"You understand I shall come to your father," he said, as they drew near the gate where it seemed discreet for them to part.
"It will make it harder to get away," she said, with no apparent despondency. "It won't stop us. Oh! do as you please."
She seemed to dismiss the question, and stood hand-in-hand with him in a state of glowing gravity. She wouldn't see him again for four-and-twenty hours. Then a thought came into her head—a point of great practical moment.
"Oh!" she said, "of course, you won't tell father you've seen me."
She met his eye. "Really you mustn't," she said. "You see—he'll make a row with mother for not having watched me better. I don't know what he isn't likely to do. It isn't myself——This is a confidential communication—all this. No one in this world knows I am meeting you. If you must go to him, go to him."
"For myself?"
She nodded, with her open eyes on his—eyes that looked now very blue and very grave, and her lips a little apart.